Should have seen this one coming. This is how it happens. Everything is fine, great even, and then this. There’s no harbinger either. The skies are clear, there’s no unidentified rattling sounds, nothing in the x-ray. Your only real warning is your own lack of expectedness. It’s like the slow ascent of a rollercoaster. You know the fall is coming, but the anticipation is so distracting that when the rickety car tips the apex and begins its plunge, you’re all like “Woah”.

]]> http://sohappynow.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/146/feed/ 0 ollie shn mining-scenes-1-pola http://sohappynow.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/on-high-rotate/ http://sohappynow.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/on-high-rotate/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:55:19 +0000 sohappynow http://sohappynow.wordpress.com/?p=31 ]]>

I love this song. I drink it in everyday, sometimes two or three times. It hydrates that bit of me I didn’t know was parched. Smiling, foot tapping, I try to audit a different layer each time so it never sounds the same.

Until one day… it does. That bit of me is saturated.

Back.

Clickityclickclickclickclick.

Tap.

Next favourite song please.

Hold… and begin.

This one is a little old now (2003)… but what a stunner.

“Eddie spends her pocket money obsessively hoarding fireworks and carefully planning for cracker night. When it finally it arrives, Eddie and her family head to the local football oval. In the frosty air Eddie lights the fuse of her first cracker and experiences a pivotal moment, one of the seemingly small experiences of childhood, that affects us for the rest of our lives.”

Click through to vimeo and watch it in higher resolution. [video]

He strides through the room, cutting it in two with his perfectly tailored black suit. Eyes fixed on an imaginary reflection on the floor. He watches it slide. It travels at a constant metre in front of him requiring him to hold his head at a perfect 45 degree angle, further accentuating an already resplendent jaw line while allowing him just enough peripheral vision to note the room’s noticers. It was a fine entrance.

Sitting at a small round table at the other end of the now cut room sits a woman. In her right hand, an enormous tumbler stacked with ice is half empty of sapphire. The thumb and middle finger of her left hand slowly rubs her temples, concealing her wide eyes and gritted teeth. She clocks him and quietly spits to herself “Cock” not realising how loud the sharp ends of her words are. This was to be her last job…

I love that people make clips like this. I love that no effort or expense has been spared in creating this one minute and ten seconds of entertainment.

You’ll need to watch it twice, by the way.

Glorious.  [video]

Earlier this month, my cheeks, chin and upper lip called a meeting to discuss convergence. The outcome of which, was the decision to grow a secret moustache.

“I think you’ll find, that only under a veil of slightly ginger, curly hair will we achieve the privacy required to pull this caper off,” exclaimed Chin. His geography has always allowed him to assert a certain level of authority over Lip and Cheeks.

“You’re the boss, Chin. You’re the boss.”

I wrote the following in my notebook while lying in a sedation room after the dentist gave me a whole bunch of roofies. As such, I remember very little of this experience.

You can read a background on how I came to be in this situation here.

It’s been 30 minutes since I took the drugs. I’m very aware of their symptoms… I think. I definitely feel sleepy. The person sat next to me here in the sedation room has been here much longer than I have and isn’t yet ‘outofit’ so they’ve just given him some more drugs… I wonder if I were to ask for more drugs if they would give them to me, or would they just laugh at me and say “He’s ready”, before taking me through to surgery.

I’m getting concerned by how rapidly my handwriting is deteriorating.

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I think the person beside me is now asleep after his double dose. There’s still some pills beside him. Maybe I should eat them. He might be saving them. I’m gonna eat them. Nah, I’ve chickened out, I’m not gonna eat them.

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I’m going to ask the nurse for more drugs.

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She’s  given me two more of the little ones. They don’t like it when you walk around their offices on drugs, which is fair enough I guess, but it’s not like I’m dangerous. In fact, I would describe myself as happy, harmless and completely predictable. Maybe they just feel responsible for me seeing as how it was them who gave me the drugs and everything. I’m gonna go ahead and believe this, despite the massive waiver form I’ve signed but not read.

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Wow, I hope this is working. I wish I could be aware of the exact moment that I stop being in control. I’d like to know what music will be playing then. Sade maybe? It’s possible given the playlist so far.

I’m going to be honest, I am very relaxed now. There is a very pleasant heaviness pressing on my entire body. There’s also a very gentle vibrating sensation that I’m fairly sure is entirely in my head, but it might not be. It feels nice anyway.

Norah Jones is playing. I’m going to close my eyes now.

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Norah has stopped. I might have blacked out a little just then. I think the silence woke me up. Is that possible? Can silence wake you up? I’m on drugs, I shouldn’t be so acutely aware of my environment, surely. I better be ‘outofit’ when they take me through. They’re going to laser my gums.

Dentistry… what the hell happened to you, man? Drills were all you had and you’ve just turned your back on them like they don’t even matter. I like writing in books… and lying down… and I think I like taking drugs. I’m definitely beginning to drift off. My vision is kind of yellowy. Cloudy. Like there’s a fine film over my eyes. I have a lot of ideas going through my head, but I can’t write them all down, they’re too fleeting and disparate. disperate. dispirit. shit.

I’m struggling to keep my eyes open.

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I don’t know what song this is… maybe Erika Badu. It’s pretty funky, that’s for sure. I hope I’m not allergic to lasers. I’m giggling to myself. The guy beside me is snoring. I’m gonna eat his drugs. Aaaah I chickened out again.

Don’t forget to brush.

My mate Justyn sent me the link to this video the other day, and I just can not stop watching it.

You know that feeling you get when you see something so much cooler than anything you could ever hope to accomplish? That kind of slightly sickly feeling, like ‘oh god, I’m so average’ sort of feeling, but mixed in with some ‘kind of excited that I’m witnessing someone else being awesome’ feeling? That’s how I feel when I watch this. Then I got worried that my liking this video might mean I’m racist. I then became even more concerned that I was racist just for thinking that.

I fell off my bike on Sunday. I didn’t crash it, I didn’t come off it while pulling some mean skids, I fell off it. Or to be more precise, while waiting at the lights of a very busy K road intersection, my bike and I together fell over while practically stationary. If the immediate moments just prior to my falling off were to receive an award, it would be for ‘Situation-Most-Likely-To-Not-End-In-An-Embarrassing-Fall’. And it would come with an enormous trophy, the top of which would be adorned with a tiny little brass figurine of me looking like a complete fuckwit.

It was pretty spectacular.

But to fully appreciate the fuckwittedness of this event, you must first appreciate how ridiculous my bicycle is. I ride a fixie. A fixie has one gear and no freewheel, which means the pedals are fixed to the back wheel. If the wheel is moving, your pedals are moving. If this sounds odd, it’s because it is. But this setup offers a very different riding experience compared to traditional bicycles. You’re much more engaged with the bike, more in control. It’s both hard to explain and ride, but once you get used to it you never want to ride anything else ever again.

I really wish I could tell you that I got my fixie for these same purist reasons that I’ve stated above (and can often be heard spouting to people when they say things like “But aren’t gears important?”) but I didn’t. I got a fixie because they look cool and they’re fucking fashionable.

That’s right, like many other moments in history, young people want to look cool and ride bikes again, and I think it took a gang of 50-year-old men panting and sweating outside Santos with their $5000 carbon-fibre bicycles and their spandex clad junk hanging out while saying things like “Cycling is the new golf” to make young people want to take cycling back. And fair enough too, people shouldn’t have to dress like a senator from Krypton to get on a bike and ride to the shops.

And so, we’re finally seeing the beginnings of an urban bicycle culture in Auckland, one where people are riding to have fun. It’s almost a movement… almost. It could graduate to a movement, but at the moment it’s still a ‘scene’. And the fixie rider is the poster child for this ‘scene’.

Now, I get this. I feel it when I ride my bike. The absence of a jockey wheel on my rear hub makes me feel smug, and when those in the know clock me on my bike, I know that they know that I look cool and have a fashionable bike, and this fills me with confidence.

So you can imagine what a fucking spectacle it was when I came off my bike at the lights last Sunday.

I think I can pretty safely sum up the feelings of every person waiting at the intersection of K road and Symonds street that evening with the phrase ‘What. A. Dick.’

I’m not even really sure how it happened. I was just a guy on a very eye-catching orange and green bicycle at the front of the lights, next thing I know, I’m lying in a small forest of road cones having just fallen on the steel tow bar of a road-workers generator. A poster child I am not. I perhaps could have saved some semblance of coolness had I immediately stood up, smiled and bowed to the waiting traffic. But it was too late for that, I was already grimacing with pain having landed squarely on my right butt cheek. And let me tell you, no one takes pity on you when you hurt your butt cheek. I know this because as I lay there on the corner, half on the road, half on this generator, I could hear my wife on the bike behind me laughing hysterically. It was quite a sound she made. A mixture of pure hilarity and spousal concern, with just a touch of ‘What. A. Dick’

Like I said, It was pretty spectacular. Almost as spectacular as the bruise I now have on my butt. It’s not your standard yellowy-brown bruise, it’s kind of speckled like a far away galaxy, like a cosmos of burst blood vessels and shame. But if there’s one positive I can take from this, it’s that I’ve finally found a reason to post a picture of my butt on the internet.

Despite it all, there are times (usually just after Spike leaves) when he is positive that he is a boring person. Sure he’s got some catchy hooks, some snappy threads and some even better clips, but every now and then he catches a glimpse of himself and an undeniable truth bends in his reflection, “I am a boring vapid yawn walking a lifeless life.”

This might effect his self-esteem if he thought anyone else had standards as high as his. But I don’t think he does. He is King Zero.